Tripomatic review + Interview with one of the founders Barbora

Tripomatic is a trip planning tool that I found only recently but instantly fell in love with. Not only the functionality, design and features are sweet, same goes with the story behind it. The app was founded by a couple who are travellers themselves and with Tripomatic they basically created something they missed on the market. By solving their own problem their venture grew into a cool startup that continues to help travellers all over the world create and plan their itineraries and make their trips better.

I’ve mentioned Tripomatic before, but it deserves a dedicated review, or a walk-through, if you want. So if you’re new to this app or haven’t got to explore its functionality fully yet, go on.

Moreover, I’ve also talked to the co-founder Barbora about the Tripomatic’s background and asked for her personal travel tips. You’ll find the interview at the end of the review.

Let’s get into it!

The first you’re asked to do after signing in is, obviously, to type in where are you going. You have options to either create your trip with exact dates (if you have them already) or without. Difference in what the app has to offer with and without the dates is minimal.

After typing (or not typing) in the date range it’s finally time to see our destination with an overview of what it has for us.

Firstly, although I use Google Maps in 99% of cases, Tripomatic’s OpenStreetMap is pretty great, too. It’s very detailed and has a quite sweeter look than Google Maps. Don’t worry about switching if you’re too a Google Maps user, you’re going to get used to them quickly.

Now on the left bar we can see all the attractions for the chosen town. If you go over them, you’ll see the correspondent venue on the map, highlighted by a nice animation (and it’s one of those little things that I really appreciate about the entire app).

Every attraction has its own description, either from Wikipedia or written by people at Tripomatic (at least I think they write them). All attractions have also added tags, like popular, sight, technology, free, beach, museum, family, entertainment, nature etc.

Only the minority of attractions doesn’t have a photo but most of them are accompanied by quality pics (and only a couple of them are without credit attribution 😉 )

Together with major links (official website, Wiki page) you get a decent grasp of what is the specific attraction about and where you can find more info. The last great feature of attractions and their descriptions is the time estimate of how much time you should devote to it. Neat, isn’t it?

Let’s move on and load our itinerary with some cool venues. Adding a place to the itinerary is so easy that even a little child wouldn’t have any problems – just click on the ‘Add to Trip’ button. You can now schedule it on any specific day of your trip. When adding another attraction, Tripomatic will automatically calculate how much time you’ll you need for transfer between them. Also, a new number will appear in your itinerary – a time estimate for the whole day.

Now that you have your itinerary filled up, you can easily edit the sequence of all attractions, delete them or add a note. If your trip is only a few days from now, you’ll see also a weather forecast (using OpenWeatherMap).

Other features like tours, hotel search and car hire might come in handy for those who are yet to book their accommodation (and tours and car). This is also what makes Tripomatic money (through commission) so if you’re keen on supporting the app this way, feel free to use them 🙂

While the hotel search works pretty well (you can find there pretty much what you would find on Tripadvisor and the info includes address, brief description, price per night and WiFi availability), one thing I would really appreciate if it was added in soon future is searching also Airbnb accommodation.

Anyway, if you find your hotel in the search, you can add it to your trip (even if you don’t want to book it through Tripomatic) and your itinerary. This means it will appear also on your map so you can always see how far is it from the attractions you added, which is pretty great.

Car hire and featured day trips work similarly, allowing you to choose the cheapest and the highest rated option from what is available in your destination.

The last thing I want to mention, and probably one of the coolest features in the app, are itineraries in pdf. After finishing your itinerary you can download it in a pdf form and use it offline when you’re short of wifi.

The pdf includes also general information about the destination like time zone, tourist contacts, currency and price ranges, information about electricity, languages, internet, public holidays, events and opening hours, transportation, dos and don’ts… pretty much everything you would expect from a typical book guide.

All in all, the pdf itinerary is one of the strongest pros of the app and a reason for using Tripomatic on its own. That doesn’t mean though that other features aren’t worth exploring, as you’ve seen above.

But what do you think, is Tripomatic something you want to try after this review?

Or have you tried it already?

Are there any other functions you’d love to see?

Share your views in the comments and enjoy the interview with Barbora from Tripomatic, who was kind enough to answer a couple of questions.

Interview with Barbora Nevosadova, the co-founder of Tripomatic

As you are a traveller yourself, what are your most favourite destinations from what you’ve visited so far? And what countries/places are leading your bucket list?

I lived in Finland for a year and I loved it. When visiting Scandinavia, people usually head to Norway to see the fjords, but I found Finnish lakes to be even more beautiful. Moreover, in Finland you can really enjoy their saunas – they are everywhere. Even if you rent a small cottage with no electricity, it has a sauna. My travel bucket list is pretty long – on the top there is Israel, followed by Australia and Madagascar.

My travel dream is to live for a few months in Australia or New Zealand. I prefer living in a foreign country for longer time, as this way you can get to know it much better. Unfortunately, my husband is not a fan of Australian spiders, so I am not sure if I persuade him to go there with me…

Any personal travel hacks or tips you could share?

When I travel to a new city, I check if there is a city card I could use for public transportation and attraction entries. In many cases you can save money using these cards. I also try to find out if there is a website/app for recommending good restaurants. Yelp and similar global services do not work very well in some non-English speaking countries, but their local versions can be very helpful (with Google Translate of course).

The team behind Tripomatic also founded WhichAirline, a low cost airline flight search. In the over-crowded waters of flight search engines what are the reasons why we should use WhichAirline instead of others?

WhichAirline offers great user interface and searching for flights there is very straightforward. Our company started with a flight search engine, but last year we decided to sell all our other projects and focus on Tripomatic only, as we see great potential there and we enjoy working on it.

What are your plans for Tripomatic in the near future?

Our aim is to make travel planning as easy and comfortable as possible. Because of that we want to add new features that simplify planning. We will improve information about public transportation in the big cities and enable our users to add it more efficiently to their trips. We also plan to streamline the way how people add their own places to the itineraries and recommend these places to other users as well.

Tripomatic is based in Brno so I suppose you could have some local tips for travellers heading there. Could you share some?

If you visit Brno in the summer, be sure to visit a few pubs and bars near Jakubske namesti. There are lots of great spots, where people grab a beer, sit outside and enjoy the warm summer weather. The overall atmosphere there makes you slow down and just have fun. I especially like Bar, který neexistuje (the name of this place is “The bar that does not exist”) for drinks or restaurant Jakoby for food.

Your most favourite travel app apart from Tripomatic (obviously)?

I like Skypicker app for searching cheap flights for weekend getaways. This service is very useful when you have a few free days and you want to find cheap air tickets somewhere. I hope I will be using the app more often this year, we did not travel a lot last year because we had a baby and I sincerely miss travelling.

Barbora and her husband Lukas on their trip around Geneva Lake in 2010, which was also the trip when they came up with Tripomatic. This photo was taken in Zermatt when Barbora was in the 6th month of pregnancy so no difficult hikes were possible.

You’re on a maternity leave now (although I’m not sure if a ‘leave’ is the right word as you’re still working and replying to my emails 🙂 ), can we expect a special version of Tripomatic for travelling families soon?

We have been very tempted to do that, but our colleagues, who do not have any kids yet, preferred Tripomatic edition for planning great bar tours 🙂 So, we will probably not launch special version for families, but we will do our best to help families plan great trips using Tripomatic. At the moment you can filter attractions according to your interests and needs and we plan to add something similar for hotels as well. We had troubles finding decent hotels for families and we want to change that.

Can you name three people in the travel industry you admire or follow?

I enjoy reading articles of Kevin May and Sean O’Neill at Tnooz.com. They write about travel industry and technology, which is exactly what I am interested in. I also follow Michael O’Leary – the CEO of Ryanair. I really admire his ability to attract attention of media and make journalists to write about his (sometimes stupid) statements.

What are the trends in travel you anticipate in the following months?

I believe that travelling on your own will become even more easier and more and more people will travel this way. Nowadays, you can plan and book your trip online, but it takes quite a lot of time and energy. This will change as the travel market will get more consolidated and available travel information will be more structured. And I hope that Tripomatic will be part of this trend and it will make travellers’ lives more comfortable.